With Tamara as a large cherry and Irena as a pollinator for the late-season Regina variety, growers are finding new opportunities in a sector where successful introductions are few and far between.

The research station responsible for the Kordia cherry cultivar, the Czech Republic's Research and Breeding Institute of Pomology Holovousy Ltd. (RBIP Holovousy), has a couple of new varietal prospects for growers around the world.

The most advanced of these, Tamara, has had a strong uptake in Europe, is in its early stages in the United States and has even been successfully exported from Australia to Hong Kong with high prices. Meanwhile, trial orchards of Irena in Switzerland have been promising as a supplement to Regina which growers often find difficult to pollinate with commercially viable varieties.

"The best thing about Tamara is the large size of the fruit and also its firmness, excellent taste, color and late ripening time," says Lubor Zeleny, an agronomist from RBIP Holovousy, also adding the cultivar has a very high and regular fruit set. 

Tamara cherries. Photo: Artevos.

Zeleny says Tamara is a cross between the varieties Krupnoplodnaja and Van, and to date growers tend to rate it very highly across a variety of metrics including taste, juiciness, firmness and size.

With a ripening time around one week after Kordia, Zeleny adds the only real drawback for the variety is its medium susceptibility to cracking. To tackle this issue, he recommends producing the variety under covering systems or in areas where fruit cracking isn't much of a problem. 

He says there haven't been any comprehensive post-harvest trials for Tamara to date, but he suspects it will perform well in storage thanks to its thick green stem.

"The fruit is big and the bruises during storage are not high - they're very low. But the grower has to do appropriate treatment against Monilinia because that is a crucial point in the storage of Tamara cherries," he says.

German company Artevos organizes the distribution of Tamara plant material to nurseries throughout Europe, and according to manager Sabine Fey the cultivar is now in its fifth commercial season with around 150 hectares planted.

She said the variety was very popular in Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, while testing had started more recently in France, Spain and Portugal.

"At the moment when I see what our nurseries are grafting off Tamara, the number of trees will increase very fast," says Fey.

"The demand is very high and the limiting factor at the moment is the material to graft new trees of the variety.

"I think the fortune of Tamara is really the very good taste and size. In our region some of the fruit growers have problems sometimes with cracking.

"Especially in the northern regions you should plant it with a roof to ensure a good quality, but besides that I don’t see any problems with Tamara. It’s a very worthy variety."

Tamara trees. Photo: Artevos

Fey hopes to be able to introduce two more RBIP Holovousy varieties to the market in 2019, but for the time being she is also happy to discuss another variety that has caught the attention of producers - Irena.

"The special thing with Irena is that you can use it as a pollinator for Regina. You can pick it together with Regina and you can sell it together with Regina, and that’s the new aspect," she says.

"You have few varieties which you can use as pollinators for Regina, but you can’t sell them together – for example Penny because of the shorter stem, the fruit quality and so on.

This effectively means that every Regina-oriented orchard can have greater commercial yields if they plant Irena as a pollinator, but the possibilities go beyond that.

"Perhaps the size of the fruit is a little bit bigger than Regina and at the moment the interest is very high in our regions because of that," she says.

"For example we have a trial orchard in Switzerland where they prefer Irena compared to Regina because you can store it better. It's a little bit firmer," she says, adding these tests have been going on for four years now.

"At the moment it seems to be very promising and interesting."

Irena is not as big as Tamara though, at around 28-30mm on average compared to 32-34mm, however Fey notes it is crispy and has a good taste.

"There are trials also here in Germany but the best results we’ve received have been in Switzerland," she adds.

Irena cherries. Photo: Artevos

The view from North America

If a variety is still in the testing stage in Europe it will likely be a while before it gets to first trials in other cherry-growing regions like the North American Pacific Northwest. This rules out Irena for the moment, but Tamara is starting to gain traction in Oregon and Washington State.

Sub-licensing of Tamara in the U.S. is administered by Varieties International, whose co-owner Dave Weil who says results look promising so far but he doesn't want to jump to any conclusions.

"It is especially the case with cherries that they seem to react or grow differently in different regions in the world, so it's really good to see how they handle our environment where we grow cherries," Weil says.

"We have a lot of new varieties now that cover the season so the U.S. market is looking for large, firm, shippable fruit with a good flavor."

He likens the cherry varietal situation to that of apples, with some cultivars not having the best taste but growers will produce them anyway due to their various benefits at the orchard level.

"For example Sweetheart is not a very good eating cherry - it's kind of woody and firm but it's easy to produce and it was our big cherry for the late season," Weil says.

"We'd like to replace it with a better eating cherry but we don’t really have anything yet. What’s going on is the bar keeps going up for what we need, and probably another need we have for new cherry varieties is they have to be shippable over relatively long distances in time.

"The U.S. market will accelerate export to Asia most likely, so that’s another criteria."

But where does Tamara fit into this scenario? Weil says there are a few 10-hectare parcels planted that were in their first harvests last year, yielding "pretty positive" data.

"But it was a baby crop off a young orchard and it was an unusual year as well. You’re looking at stem pull retension, uniformity and ripeness so it takes some time to work those details out," he says.

"The major point is that Tamara did very well in just about all the categories we’re interested in so it looks very promising.

He said the largest and more established plantings of Tamara belong to McDougall and Sons in the Wenatchee area of Washington State, and David and Stacey Cooper of Dalles, Oregon.

He adds one benefit for Tamara production in the Pacific Northwest is that unlike in Europe, cracking isn't much of an issue.

"Our districts are dry districts so we generally don’t have a lot of cracking pressure compared to Europe," he says.

In terms of timing in the region, he says Tamara would compete a little bit with the Skeena variety but more with Attica.

"At at the moment it’s significantly bigger than Attica and it’s bigger than Skeena; it has roughly the same firmness as Skeena which is very good," he says.

"Flavor is as good or better than Skeena. The firmness and shippability seem to be adequate; that’s the part we’re waiting on.

"It’s heavy yielding as well even though it is not self-fertile."

He reiterates testing times for cherries are much longer than they used to be due to the added post-harvest requirements, but overall the outlook is positive for this Czech-bred cultivar.

"It’s hard to find a cherry as good as Tamara that’s gotten this far so it’s pretty exciting. I think it’s going to be a great cherry," he says.

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